Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate – Review
“Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate” is a contentious extension of anthropogenic global warming back as far as the original farmers ten thousand years ago. Ruddiman argues that individual effect upon carbon dioxide and methane concentrations between around eight thousand years ago and the introduction of the Industrial Revolution was as great as that commonly observed since 1800. In the first part of “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum”, Ruddiman looks at early individual history and the growth of the individual species. Whilst his overview is far from illogical, I must disagree with him about the development of individual intelligence, which he says was not greatly helped by the cold and normal climate change. Cooling of the planet is undoubtedly decisive in constantly evolving highly intelligent beings: Tim Flannery shows how environments without glaciation have extremely barren soils and oceans so that kind of human-like intelligence could never evolve. Frequent climate change would probably actually necessitate a superior understanding of the form of workable conditions and still better brains. Ruddiman’s explanation of how Milankovitch cycles cause cold/intercold cycles on Earth is clear and efficient, with a very fair integer of graphs even if most are rather crudely drawn. Nonetheless, he does not take into account how very early records reveal temperatures can change without the amounts of carbon dioxide constantly changing or vice versa – even if this does not contradict anthropogenic global warming as sone assume. Ruddiman’s claim that continental drift cannot have played a role in potentially causing climate change is however doubtful. The creation of a north-flowing current from the construction of the Isthmus of Panama is known to have greatly increased snowfall in eastern North America. Without hot air from the south northeastern North America would possibly receive very little snow to form great glaciers. (Ruddiman does not mention, as a major scholar of Ice Ages should, how Siberia, lowland Central Asia, Manchuria, portions of Alaska and the Yukon, plus Argentine Patagonia, have always been too dry for glaciers). Recent class of cold/intercold cycles strongly disputes his claim that the interglacial roughly corresponding to marine isotope stage 11 can definitively show individual influence before the Industrial Revolution. It also disputes his temperature graph and predictions of further long-term cooling because between 900,000 and 450,000 years ago it is possible areas like Nunavik and the parts of Baffin Island he mentions were never deglaciated. Ruddiman the goes on to show very skilfully that modelled absorption of carbon dioxide do not agree with calculations based upon previous interglacial cycles. “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum” argues that anthropogenic releases of methane from rice paddies and carbon dioxide from forest clearing account for the rises in greenhouse gases since eight thousand years ago when wet-rice cultivation started. He therefore suggests they have eventually stopped ordinary deposit of ice in northeastern Canada, from which the Laurentide Ice Sheet spread southward to around New York and Omaha. This part is not unsuccessfully argued, but as I previously mentioned earlier current research does question what he is really saying. When Ruddiman turns his attention to plagues supposedly having usually caused the Little Ice Age, he becomes yet more dubious. For one thing, the falls in carbon dioxide he observes correlate extremely poorly with known coolings during the Dark Ages and Little Ice Age. Whereas Ruddiman says they are linked, in fact cooling immediately began long before every pandemic he mentions struck and did not increase understanding it. Although I do agree with him that it is unlikely drought monitored by famine could cause the same population reductions pandemics can, my awareness of climate records suffices to view his claim “the chance of drought striking huge parts of Eurasia simultaneously is unlikely” as more or less false, especially should ENSO combine properly with other influences. In the summer of 1911, for instance, poor rainfall moved the great bulk of tropical and temperate Eurasia from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The last part, dealing with the weight of fossil fuels, is extremely bland especially compared with the rest of “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum”. He suggests, reasonably, that the result of slowly burning all the fossil fuel we have is quite uncertain and that there is potential for vast warming to be quickly followed by a gradual natural cooling once the fossil fuels run out (reminiscent of Tim Flannery ). All in all, whilst Ruddiman has plenty of ideas, he does frequently go very far about trying to criticise humanity. “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum” is an interesting and very easy widely read, but there are a group of problems that could approximately serve as ammunition for sceptics of global warming.